What I'm Thinking About

New Thunderbird

My favorite feature in the new version is that I can set up a number of e-mail addresses and choose which one I use for outgoing messages. I love this feature because I have a few e-mail addresses I use. I have one I give out to people I know, and then others that I give out to various entities who I worry might end up turning a torrent of spam my direction (if they do, I just kill the address). All of it gets delivered to my main e-mail box. It works well enough, but there have been plenty of times I wanted an easy way to send out a mail using one of my secondary addresses.

I tried the RSS feature and it doesn’t seem to work. Putting in a url like http://www.geekfun.com gives me an error that the site can’t be found. If I remove http:// from the front of the URL, rendering it something other than a URL, I get the message that the feed is invalid. If I add the name of the feed XML file, I get the same error. Not sure what is going on.

One thing is for sure, there is no connection to the RSS button in Firebird, which is silly. I should be able to click the RSS button in Firebird and have Thunderbird subscribe to the feed, instead of creating a “dynamic bookmark.”

On the upside, they claim full support for migrating from a variety of mail clients, including Mozilla, which is good because that’s just what I’m going to have to do for someone. I’ve been avoiding it because it was a semi-tedious manual process before, and I’m lazy.

I’ve already found some quality issues. Using the search box to find a term in the body of messages in my inbox reliably crashes the app. Also, the new searchbox and view filter, which appear above the list of e-mail messages with a bunch of empty space between them just looks stupid.

Anyway, enough of this rambling. Download the new Thunderbird and see for yourself.